Month: November 2009

Elise and I bought our current house six years ago. John & Christine moved out of their rental house and into their first house in Austin around the same time. During our mutual moves, I got John’s L-shaped desk on permanent loan until he needed it back. He was helping me out by furnishing our home office. I was helping him out by providing free storage until he needed the desk and accompanying cabinets. Last week, John needed his office furniture back. So that was our excuse to go out and get new office furniture. Getting new office furniture meant that we had to paint the office again. Painting the office meant that we had to move most everything out of the office. Moving everything meant that I found a bunch of stuff to get rid of.

I couldn’t tell you the last time I sold something on eBay. I don’t think I’ll ever sell anything on eBay again. eBay’s a pain in the ass. Listing a single item takes too long in that you have to fill out so many forms, then you have to pay a listing fee, final value fee (at least I did the last time I sold something) and then you have to deal with potential buyer questions and, worst of all, shipping. When you factor in all of the above, it’s not worth the time to sell a single item every once in a while on eBay.

If I have something that I need to sell these days, I’ll approach my immediate personal network first (friends, neighbors, etc.) If I don’t get a quick response, I’ll take 5 minutes and snap a few good photos and write a good, honest description of the item I’m selling and post it on craigslist. Austin has a fantastic craiglist community and I’ve had a great overall experience both buying and selling there.

When we were cleaning out the office, I found a couple old hard drives and a wireless router that I’d been hoarding for years. I decided to take photos of them with my phone and sell them. Here are the items I listed:

$15 Seagate 120GB ATA hard drive
$15 Maxtor 160GB SATA hard drive
$10 Netgear 802.11g wireless router

And then the craigslist community turned into one that nearly rivals eBay’s. I’ve had people email me who want me to take detailed photos of one of the hard drives. One gentleman emailed me and asked for my home phone number so we could run a series of tests on the wireless router. I had to bite my lip and not respond immediately. I took Elise’s advice and politely wrote the gentleman back and stated: “you have my money back guarantee that the router works.

The moral of the story: spend your spare time reading the “Best of craigslist” and just horde your junk. You’ll be happier that way.

I haven’t written on the website in a really long time — two months, in fact. I have a really good reason for having not written, and when I figure out what that reason is, I’ll write about it and post it here.

Writing has always been very therapeutic for me, and it’s a way for me maintain my sense of wit and humor in a world that’s otherwise told me that my abs are flabby and and I need to refinance the house. I’m not one for New Years resolutions, or any form or resolution, but my thoughts are to just start writing again. Life happens and, before you know it, it starts slipping away from us all, undocumented. I have a terrible memory, so I used to write about our lives’ happenings here. It’s always fun to browse the Janicek.com archives to see what we were doing on this date 5 (or however many) years ago. In fact, this time 6 years ago, we were shopping for the house that we still live in. And 7 years ago, we bought Elise’s Jeep (that is now my daily commuter). And 8 years ago around this time I lost my first job out of college at the tail-end of the dot-com fallout.

I updated Janicek.com’s theme this evening. For a few years I tried to make money by serving ads here on the site. You’ll be impressed with the fact that over those years, I amassed enough advertising revenue to buy a starter pack of ab-intensifying topical cream from a late night infomercial. I think it looks so much better without all of the ads (I’m still talking about my stomach muscles here). I can’t seem to figure out how to get the monthly archives to properly display over there to the right of your screen, but I’m sure I’ll be able to figure that out soon enough. In the meantime, you can always watch my 2002 episode of “Cribs”, which was shot when we were recently married and still poor from our days as a dot-com ex-employee and a beer cart girl.

So lots of cool things have happened in years past, none of which are referenced above. My hopes and aspirations are to focus more on important topics, like raising an almost-four-year-old daughter, duck herding, and the other truly important things in life.